These things are little high-quality digital audio recorders. They’re smaller than most portable compact-cassette recorders - actually, they’re approaching the size of an old microcassette dictation recorder - but they have sound quality that the old concert bootleggers could only dream of. These sorts of recorders come with built-in microphones, of far higher quality than the mics in any small portable recorder before low-power portable audio-processing hardware and low-cost Flash RAM made this sort of device possible. You could have put super-high-quality mics on an old cassette recorder if you wanted to, but it was pointless; nothing you could stick in even a large pocket could record good enough audio to justify expensive mics.
(Yes, I know there were some relatively small analogue-tape field recorders that gave very good results - usually because they recorded on something better than a cassette - if you plugged a quality mic into them. There was probably also some integrated-microphone doodad that recorded on small reel-to-reel tape or Type IV cassettes with Dolby S or something, about which I just haven’t happened to hear. But modern digital field recorders are still amazing, all right?)
Anyway, Linder set up all three recorders next to each other, and talked and then played guitar into the built-in microphones. Then he posted the audio from the three recorders, for his readers to audition.
Overall, the commenters opined that the H4 was OK, the H4n was better, and the PCM-D50 was best. They were pretty much unanimous that the difference between the H4 and the Sony was as plain as day - compared with the Sony, the H4 was “muddy” or “muddled”, “disjointed”, “scrambled”, or slightly noisier; one commenter called it “not even worth talking about”. One guy even said he heard wow and flutter. There was general agreement that the Sony was clearly superior.
The only problem with all this - which another commenter soon discovered - was that Brad actually screwed up. Instead of pasting in the embed code for all three recorders, he pasted in the H4 code, then the H4n code… and then the H4 code again. He just labelled it as the Sony PCM-D50.
So the first, and the third, sound clips were precisely identical. On account of being the same sound clip twice. But the one that was labelled Samson Zoom H4 sounded lousy, and the one that was labelled Sony PCM-D50 sounded great.
This happy accident reminds me of the techniques James Randi has so often used on people with alleged supernatural abilities. I’m re-reading his classic Flim-Flam!, which contains a number of examples. When, for instance, a woman said she could use dowsing to find ancient ruins just by examining a map, without even a scale or North-pointer, Randi tested her on three maps in sequence, all of which were actually of the same well-explored part of Peru, but rotated and scaled differently.
Needless to say, her exceedingly vague results put “ruins” in different places every time, and not a one of ‘em even managed to hit Machu Picchu, which was exactly the sort of thing she said she could find.
(Audiophiles usually seem to address psychoacoustic problems by adding as many more uncontrolled variables to their sound comparisons as they can. I presume this is some sort of demonstration that their perception of sound is not merely superhuman, but super-mega-ultra-hyper-human.)
The creator couldn’t get four ScanJet 3Cs at a reasonable price, so the scanner is overdubbed into four voices. But everything else is live - hence, presumably, the less-than-perfect sync between instruments.
Johnny Five is still totally headbanging at four minutes 11 seconds, though.
Everybody who found the SX-150 demo from that post to be agonising listening: The first of these videos is safe for you. The second is not.
This track’s held together by the DS-10, of course, which is a proper little music production environment. Both the Stylophone and the SX-150 are sweetened up by a lot of reverb, as well.
But just the same - this is actual music, using the actual particular capabilities of these funny little synths. The SX-150 has My First Analogue Synth tweakability, and the Stylophone lets you do effortless “keyboard” glissandos, including only the “white notes” or - with some more dexterity - the whole chromatic scale.
Play these instruments “dry”, though, and you get something more like this:
Still an actual tune, but not exactly easy listening.
I bought a Gakken SX-150. It’s the first electronic musical instrument from their brilliant “Otona no Kagaku” line of “magazine kits”, which all come in a funny box with a magazine attached to it that contains instructions for building whatever the thing is.
The instructions, like Gakken’s Web sites, are always in Japanese, but this seldom poses much of a problem. Particularly not in the case of the SX-150, which is quite trivial to put together. As I write this, the Hobbylink Japan page for the SX-150 says “It requires both cement and painting to complete or use. 124 parts” is incorrect. You actually only have to screw the circuit board into the casing, screw down the contacts for the two ends of the ribbon controller and the stylus, and screw down the edges of the little speaker. And put four AAs in it. And cut out and attach the cardboard back panel, if you like.
(I found that Hobbylink Japan had it the cheapest, for Australian shoppers anyway, at about 4380 yen delivered, which is under $US50 as I write this. But it’s also out of stock at the moment. The Make: store has it for a higher price, though, as do several otherdealers.)
The SX-150 doesn’t have what you’d call a huge palette of tonal variety - mainly pitch and resonance variations on a, yes, distinctly Stylophone-ish screech - but you can also coax a decent bass tone out of it, as well as various sweeps and bleeps of no use for melodies.
This discussion on monome.org mentions people not seeing the point of the SX-150 until they heard a “mid 90’s acid track”; I concur.
Apparently, someone at Gakken said “Let’s make a small device with which people will be able to approximately recreate the lead-synth line from Da Hool’s “Meet Her At The Love Parade“, and somebody else said “Well, it’ll need at least a Resonance knob, then”, and the SX-150 sort of grew from there.
(Their next product will presumably be the Europa-8, purpose-built to allow you to play the lead synth line from “Axel F”.)
The tiny built-in speaker is of course not a bass-monster, but it’s easy to plug the SX-150 into other speakers. Its “Output” socket is a fairly hot line-level, so can’t drive full-sized headphones very loudly. (It’ll probably be OK with little earbud headphones.) It should work fine with any guitar amplifier or effects pedal/unit, though, or with hi-fi gear and headphone amplifiers. I have already connected it to the stereo through an old cheesy digital reverb unit, with entertaining (for me, anyway) results.
Can you actually play a tune on it?
Yes. I was very pleasantly surprised by how musical this tinny little thing actually is.
The standard pitch control on the SX-150 is the prominent black resistance “ribbon” on the front, which you play with the little wired stylus. Left is bass, right is treble, and the total pitch range of the ribbon is a bit more than four octaves.
Some people have achieved tune-playing on an SX-150 by hacking an actual keyboard onto it, with keys connected to the stylus terminal that make contact with the stock ribbon controller at the appropriate points. But you don’t need to do that. Even with the standard ribbon, someone with reasonable dexterity can play actual repeatable notes.
The ribbon makes the SX-150 a “fretless” instrument, like a violin or fretless bass. So you’ll never actually hit exactly the same note twice. But the pitch-change-per-millimetre is constant - an octave is about 19mm, no matter where on the strip you’re playing - and this makes the SX-150 much easier to play than many real fretless instruments. In all regular string instruments, the notes get closer and closer together as they get higher - you can see this effect in the spacing of the frets on fretted instruments.
So in this respect, the SX-150 is like the ondes Martenot or its younger, poorer cousin the Electro-Theremin, which can both make very theremin-y sounds (that’s an Electro-Theremin in “Good Vibrations”, for instance, not a proper theremin), but are operated by simply moving your hand a set distance for a set pitch change, no matter what pitch you’re starting from.
(And then there are trombones, which I have yet to be persuaded do not produce entirely random tones.)
I don’t know much about electronics. Can I still do interesting things with an SX-150 (besides just trying to play it)?
Yes. Adding actual new non-trivial features to the SX-150 isn’t for beginners, but this thing is genuinely educational, in the very best way. It can teach you things about electronics, and about analogue synthesisers.
Some basic facts: The probe is negative, and the probe-to-strip voltage varies from about 1.6V at the high end of the strip to about 0.8V at the low end. The end-to-end resistance of the strip is about 50 kiloohms.
What this means is that when you connect the probe to the top end of the strip through a multimeter, as I did to get the above numbers, the SX-150 will play a very low note, as a tiny amount of current passes through the multimeter’s voltage range.
Many similar tricks are possible. Hold the probe-end in one hand, for instance, lick a finger on the other hand and press it to the top of the strip, and you’ll get a low-bass note. Sliding your finger down from there will get you lower and lower bass, far beyond the ability of the tiny speaker to reproduce.
Use a paper-clip as a second stylus, touching the lengthy bit of bare metal on the proper stylus to the paper-clip and then disconnecting it again, with the other end of both stylus and clip touching the ribbon, to create a yodelling effect!
Observe the small but noticeable change in pitch and noise when you hold the stylus close to the tip - so your skin touches the stylus metal - as opposed to holding only the plastic handle!
And the SX-150 is a very limited instrument, of course, of very little use for “real” music. But limitations focus you on what you can do, and this really is a bonsai analogue synthesiser to play with, not just a Stylophone.
Does the “EXT.SOURCE” socket actually do anything?
Yes, imaginary questioner, it does. How convenient that you just asked exactly the right question for me to be able to continue what I just wrote.
The EXT.SOURCE input is a simple example of what all the fuss is about with analogue synthesisers, and the modern software simulations thereof. If you plug a very “hot” signal into that input, it converts amplitude to pitch. Line-level isn’t good enough (which is why many people seem to have concluded that it doesn’t do anything at all), and most headphone sockets won’t go loud enough either; Gakken made this input to interface with their little Theremin. If you’ve got a loud enough input, though - like a headphone amplifier, or a normal amp turned up only a little bit - there it is; the louder the input, the higher the tone from the SX-150.
This is not very useful, if you don’t have the little Theremin. Actually, I think it’s probably not terribly useful even if you do. But it helps you make the one great conceptual leap of the analogue synthesiser, especially the modular analogue synth that’s a wall of separate “modules” connected together with a spaghetti of patch leads.
That conceptual leap is to realise that audio signals, when conveniently converted to electricity, can readily be transformed in this sort of way. If amplitude becomes pitch a “BOOM tish BOOM tish BOOM tish” drum line becomes “peep boop peep boop peep boop”.
That’s the whole point of the modular synth. It’s all just voltages that different modules create or modify in different ways, and how and where those voltages become actual sounds is entirely up to you.
The SX-150 doesn’t take you all the way back to Jean-Jacques and Delia, recording individual oscillator-noises on tape and then endlessly dubbing and splicing. But no mere human has the patience for that. It does, however, give you a real little insight into the dawn of the true synthesiser. So even if you have to pay $US75 for it, I reckon it’s a pretty good deal.
UPDATE: Here’s someone playing an SX-150.
(The reverb effect later in the clip is, of course, being created by outboard hardware.)
I was aware of the existence of Tim Minchin, a musician who could be making nothing but finely crafted terribly earnest heartfelt ballads, but who is unable to resist the urge to just crack a few jokes.
I was unaware, however, of his unfashionable belief in the existence of empirical reality.
This one’s audio-only:
And man, have I ever been there.
Ideally, you’ve got someone like Tim on hand so you can tag him in when you need to go out for a little walk after being told about the Muslim Mafia that’s breaking like a swarthy tsunami over the civilised world, or whatever.
If your tag-team comrade can bust mad rhymes, so much the better.
Apropos of this, I was just looking through the review-site article announcements that constantly pitter-pat into my Dan’s Data mailbox (I only do announcements via RSS these days, but plenty of sites still have a mailing list as well).
(Cable stands are, by the way, one of the things mentioned on that I Like Jam audiophile page I linked to the other day. Apparently it’s now common knowledge among a certain class of audiophile that badness can leak from the floor into any cable, including optical cables and power cables. I’m not sure whether this is still a problem if you don’t live on the ground floor of a building.)
Digital and analogue? What’s the difference? Spend big bucks - and whatever you do, keep those wires off the carpet!
Even if you don’t have a single analogue interconnect except for your speaker cables, Digital Trends are here to tell you, on behalf of that guy who sells hi-fi gear, that if you’re not spending “20 percent of the entire worth of your system on cable and wire”, you’re doing it wrong.
(Fortunately, it was quite easy for me to unsubscribe from the Digital Trends mailing list.)
Audiophile nonsense, about which I have of course written on numerous previous occasions, is sort of the Fisher-Price, bonsai version of the real, serious scams, like medical quackery.
Nobody’s dying young because of audiophile flim-flam (well, not unless they leave their amplifier plugged in while they replace the tubes…), nobody’s spending money they can ill afford to lose (well, OK, maybe some of the crazier ones), nobody’s being led into criminal activity. Audiophile nuttitude is just people getting together to fool each other and themselves. Sometimes a lot of money changes hands, but it’s all entirely voluntary and essentially harmless.
I’m sure some vendors of crazy hi-fi products are well aware that they’re running a scam, But most seem to be sincere - if pompous, wilfully ignorant and sometimes a bitrude.
Regular readers will know that Unique Hardware are the makers of the hilariously-named but great-looking and, more importantly, surprisingly-good-sounding “HUMP” series of USB computer speakers.
A while ago, I reviewed their NF01 and NF02 speakers, which differ only in the USB amplifier module. The NF02s…
…have an amp with buttons and an auxiliary input.
In brief, these tiny (but surprisingly heavy) speakers sound quite remarkably good for their size. Which really is astonishingly small.
When I reviewed them, though, they cost about 75 US dollars delivered, and you could only buy them on eBay.
You still can buy Unique Hardware speakers on eBay; the US ebay.com store is here, and the Australian-dollar version is here. The price is now down to about $65 delivered, which would be too much to pay for ordinary crappy plastic USB speakers, but is quite a good deal for the Unique Hardware products. They’re unquestionably the finest “pocket sized” speakers in existence. If you ask me, their only weakness is that if you treat them roughly and fracture the cables - which you could easily do in less than a year, if you’re chucking them into your laptop bag twice a day - you’re going to have a dickens of a time repairing them.
I’ve recently updated the review to mention that ThinkGeek have started selling “Crystal USB Desktop Speakers” that’re obviously actually NF01s, for only $US39.99 plus delivery. That’s a great price, if you’re in the USA and don’t have to pay much for delivery.
Oddly, however, Unique Hardware tell me that they aren’t actually wholesaling any speakers to ThinkGeek. In truth, they’ve been having some trouble making money on the product.
It’s not likely that the ThinkGeek speakers are inferior copies, though. The rock-solid machined-acrylic cabinets that make the Unique Hardware speakers special also make them rather difficult to clone. Unique Hardware believe that ThinkGeek have actually bought a crate or three of NF01s from some other outfit that earlier bought them from Unique, then found the speakers hard to sell.
(If you’re a ThinkGeek insider with more info, do feel free to fill me in.)
It’s not surprising that people - including the manufacturers - have had trouble shifting these speakers. As I point out at the beginning of the review, little tiny computer speakers, as a general rule, suck. Sucky speakers that cost ten bucks are one thing; sucky speakers that cost more than $50 are quite another. When Engadget mentioned the “new” ThinkGeek product, they therefore quite reasonably assumed the Crystal USB Desktop Speakers sounded lousy.
But they really, really don’t.
No, these little speakers don’t have much bass, and no, they don’t go up to party volume. But they really are a very great deal better than you’d think.
I invite US readers to buy up ThinkGeek’s entire stock, which Unique Hardware figure isn’t more than about 500 units. Then they may have to start buying direct from Unique, who deserve more business.
This theremin has what sounds like a pretty nasty Stylophone sawtooth waveform, as opposed to the classic, more mellow, otherworldly-violin…
…but it’s a theremin nonetheless.
Musical cats do not, of course, usually show any awareness that there’s a connection between what they’re doing and the noises that’re being made. The cat walks down the piano because that’s how you get to the windowsill; the cat plays the theremin because it enjoys bopping the interesting springy wire.
